Introduction

The video streaming services industry has taken the world by storm in the past decade, something that consumers use on daily basis and has seen a new level of usage especially over the pandemic period. Streaming services have boomed in popularity, with the number of global subscribers passing 1 billion for the first time in 2020, according to the LA Times. Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and Disney+ are just some names on the long and growing list of streaming services available to subscribers. These services offer users the chance to stream titles from home and are now a cornerstone in how people consume content. The war to be the best streaming service however has gotten ever-more complicated. Sometimes the amount of options can be overwhelming and deciding which platform to use can be confusing. So I decided to do an analysis of the content offered by the various platforms.

I used Kaggle datasets of TV shows and movies offered on these 4 streaming platforms as of 2020. I wanted to know which service trumps the rest by using certain metrics such as, availability by year, amount of content, popular and highly-rated movies. I decided to compare the quantity of content by visualizing the number of TV shows vs the number of movies. I also wanted to know which service had the most highly-rated movies and shows. These are the deciding factors I believe users take into consideration while deciding on which service should be chosen.

Tools Used:

• Data that have been used here is from Kaggle. The data contains 
  • Movies on Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu and Disney+ (as of 2020)
  • TV shows on Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu and Disney+ (as of 2020)
  • Movie and show ratings on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes
• I have used Tableau Public to create charts to visualize the data I am trying to portray. 
• I have also used online websites to research and understand more of what I am trying to highlight about the streaming services

Data Preparation

I wanted to get data sets which have information regarding the title of the content, the year it was produced, and, the genres and what are the ratings from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. For the TV shows, I was able to get all this information in one table. However, for movies, initially I only had a table which had the Rotten Tomatoes score but not the IMDB ratings.

So I was able to source another data set from the IMDB website, which contained the IMDB scores for all their database as well. I then used a join to link the tables on the Title/Name of the movie or show through Tableau so that I can pull the IMDB rating information as well.

Availability

An important factor to consider when choosing any streaming service is the selection of movies and shows available. Especially for avid movie watchers, the amount of content available is key to exploring new entertainment and stepping outside of one’s comfort zone. From the graph 1, it is very much evident that, Amazon prime has the highest number of movies and has a high volume of TV shows as of 2020. The trends among the four services are consistent for both shows and movies as the order of greatest to least amount of content is: Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. It is also important to notice that Prime Video contains the most movie titles by a large margin. However, Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu are more comparable in the amount of TV shows they produce and provide to consumers which does not come as a surprise considering the amount of original content on these services. In addition, the low amount of content on Disney+ could be due to it being the newest platform and the fact that they only contain titles produced or owned by Disney.

Below are the two graphs that show the distribution of the movies and shows by year. For movies, even though Disney+ has lesser content compared to other streaming services, it has more distribution of movies by year. From the below two graphs, it is clear that Amazon Prime and Hulu are the two streaming services that have a large movie collection in terms of distribution by year.

From the below graph, we can say that Disney+ has the highest number of movies in animation compared to others, Disney+ has capitalized on the animation market. Disney+ is lacking in Drama, Crime, Horror, etc. so it makes sense why Disney+ buys more content geared toward adults. 

Popularity

While the TV shows data source did not have a field for Genre, I was able to create a graph showing the average IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes score of the movie content and TV shows across the various platforms. From this graph, we can infer that there is only a slight variation in IMDB score rating among the streaming services, which solidifies it how they are focused on ​​ensuring high-quality content and original programming. Rotten Tomatoes scores are a little more varied and show that Amazon Prime has lower ratings compared to the other platforms while Netflix has the highest.

Reflection

In conclusion, the content among the different platforms is very varied, with Prime and Netflix having the highest content in terms of TV shows and movies. In terms of availability on years of production of the content Prime reigns supreme having a large number of titles dating back to the early 1920s. In terms of the Genre of the movie content, it is pretty much even among Netflix, Hulu and Prime while Disney+ does have a strong hold on the animation genre.

In the future, I would like to further investigate and get more datasets in terms of content production such as directors, budget, box office collections, and awards and recognitions. I would like to analyze the view count across the platforms to understand the user perspective of the platforms as a product.